XCIX. La loi
XCIX. The Law
The Irish potato famine crisis, Britain's corn law debate, and French military operations in Algeria dominate this issue.
- A Dublin deputation including Daniel O'Connell presented Lord Heytesbury with seven urgent resolutions demanding port openings, grain export bans, and a £1 million emergency loan to avert Irish famine.
- French colonel Géry's column surprised the Beni-Chougrans in their supposedly inaccessible ravines at 1 a.m., seizing 600 tents and 300 oxen before Arab cavalry, emboldened by a prophecy, hurled themselves on the rearguard — leaving 5 French dead and 39 wounded.
- An Arab ex-spahi named Mohammed ben Amarouch walked nearly the entire distance from Marseilles to Paris with 60 francs in his pocket, seeking the King to appoint him kaïd of the Beni-Salah in honour of his brother killed fighting for France.
- Some 500 Algerian prisoners of war, including a wife of Abd el-Kader captured at the smala, live on the Île Sainte-Marguerite in tents, self-governed by cadis, with livestock delivered alive for slaughter per Islamic custom.
- All planets of the solar system are simultaneously visible on the Paris horizon — currently for only 20 minutes, but by 1 January the window will stretch to three hours and forty-five minutes.
- France's national medical congress voted that town physicians should sit in equal numbers to professors on thesis examination juries, and debated whether to abolish the two-tier distinction between docteurs and officiers de santé.
- A carrier named Prosper Meunier watched helplessly as a wagon carrying 60,000–80,000 francs' worth of mirrors, porcelain, and crystal burned to ash on the road to Reims after a box of chemical matches ignited the load.
- Playwright Frédéric Gaillardet, ruined by the 1837 American banking collapse and his partner's death from yellow fever in New Orleans, rebuilt his fortune founding the Courrier des États-Unis in New York and won a Paris court ruling annulling his wrongful bankruptcy declaration.